Hello: I recently installed Debian 1.3.1 that I purchased from Linux System Labs. I have had several problems, and cannot seem to find the answers.
I installed the system by booting from a floppy and installing the base system from cdrom. (My cdrom is bootable; the cd is bootable, but for some reason, booting from cd just hangs... but that's not too important). During the "first part" of the installation --- that is, the essential system setup, just before rebooting and heading into dselect --- I opted to make my hard drive bootable. But, I get the following message: Currently it is impossible to boot from the second harddisk. Please boot the system using the rescue boot method and configure LILO manually. Indeed I did as the message told me, booted with the rescue disk, went through dselect, setting up my system, etc. I configured LILO by hand. Since I ran Slacware 3.4 successfully for about a year, I simply dropped in lilo.conf from my old setup, and ran lilo. No errors. However, when I booted, the system was about half-way through booting, and just after where it prints "Partition check" I got the following error: VFS: Cannot open root device 80:3b Kernel panici: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 80:3b I understand the numbers mean major:minor device specs --- since I'm going off of /dev/sda3, shouldn't the numbers be 8:3? I toured www.DejaNews.com for help, and tried the following things, all to no avail: 1. Installed a new kernel --- several times! I used the *exact* same kernel configuration file as I did for Slackware. I checked, re-checked, and triple checked the SCSI options to make sure they were okay. 2. Ran "rdev <kernel file> /dev/sda3" on my kernels: both the one Debian installed, and the one I custom installed. 3. Also, some folks from dejanews said it could be a problem booting past the 2mb mark. Well, when I setup the partitions long ago, I took this into account, and /dev/sda1 is about a gig minus 50 megs to make room for /dev/sda2, my 50 meg Linux swap partition, and /dev/sda3 is where linux actually runs off of, and it's just under a gig. Plus Slackware ran on this exact same setup for over a year, with no problems. 4. Even so, I could still use the rescue disk and do a "rescue root=/dev/sda3" In my extreme frustration, I started all over, from the beginning, and now everything is apparently fine. However, after the "first step," I still got the "...impossible to boot from the second harddisk..." message, again forcing me to do lilo.conf by hand. AND, when I booted to run dselect, from the rescue disk, Linux got half-way through the boot and said "Unable to open an initial console" and just froze! I hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE and repeated booting from the rescue disk, and everything was fine. I installed, configured lilo, and so far I have no real problems. My concern, though, is what caused these errors, and are they likely to show up again? Is my system stable? I never had any errors with Slackware... <grin> Here is a quick rundown of important system info: I nuked a Slackware 3.4 install that was on my 1gb /dev/sda3 partition for Debian. I have Win95 on a 1gb /dev/sda1 partition, a 50mb /dev/sda2 partition, and an ext2 2gb /dev/sda4 partition I use just for storage (e.g. ftp's home). I have an Adaptec 2940uw card and a 4 gig Seagate scsi drive attached. This is a 98mb ram P-II system, with an IDE cd rom on /dev/hdc. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]